Medical Infographics: Resemiotization Strategies in Specialized Discourse

This chapter addresses the spreading genre of digital infographics, i.e., the conflation of visual and verbal language in the graphic visualization of specific sets of data, information and knowledge, so as to facilitate, accelerate and disseminate specialized cognition processes throughout a digitally competent global audience. Originating from 19th-century economic cartography, military strategy and statistics, and actualizing what C.S. Peirce tagged as a ‘supersign’ (an artefact combining different sign systems such as symbols, icons and indexes), infographic textuality pivots on multi-literacy strategies, allowing large amounts of complex information to be systematized and presented synoptically. By activating multi-cognitive skills through the simultaneous use of visual elements, verbal contents and specialized knowledge frameworks, infographics is nowadays used for a variety of disciplinary dissemination processes. This contribution deals in particular with infographics in the specialized domain of medical knowledge. The resemiotization process inherent to infographics can be ranked as a major strategy for today’s medical communication, especially for the purpose of drawing and validating the epistemic norms of coherence and verification that define evidence-based clinical knowledge, both within and outside the scientific community. The intersemiotic presentation of evidence proves crucial in the epistemological construction of medical discourse. Within the linguistic framework provided by Systemic Functional Grammar metafunctions, and drawing from multimodal analysis, social semiotics, and medical discourse analysis, this chapter investigates how and to what extent medical communication can be shaped by the emergence of new digital genres.